关键词： Mobile edge computing   connected car sharing   depot location   vehicle relocation   travel demand prediction   spatio-temporal mining  

摘要： Mobile edge computing supports the connected cars to ensure real-time, interactive, secured, and distributed services for customers. Connected car-sharing systems, as the promising appliance of connected cars, provide a convenient transportation mode for citizens' intra-urban commutes. Determining the locations of depots is the primary job in connected car-sharing systems. Existing methods mainly use qualitative method and do not consider spatial-temporal dynamic travel demands. This article proposes a mobile edge computing-based connected car framework which uses normal taxis as connected cars to describe their Global Positioning System trajectory and perform the computing tasks in each mobile edge computing server independently. A spatial-temporal demand coverage approach is developed to optimize the location of depots. This article proposes a deep learning method to predict car-sharing demand constructed by a stacked auto-encoder model and a logistic regression layer. The stacked auto-encoder model is employed for learning the latent spatial and temporal correlation features of demand. A graph-based resource relocation model is proposed to minimize the cost of relocation considering spatio-temporal variation of car-sharing demand. Experiments performed on the large-scale real-world data sets illustrate that our proposed model has superior performance than existing methods.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   augmented reality   resource allocation   shared offloading   multicasting  

摘要： Mobile edge computing is a provisioning solution to enable augmented reality (AR) applications on mobile devices. AR mobile applications have inherent collaborative properties in terms of data collection in the uplink, computing at the edge, and data delivery in the downlink. In this letter, these features are leveraged to propose a novel resource allocation approach over both communication and computation resources. The approach, implemented via successive convex approximation, is seen to yield considerable gains in mobile energy consumption as compared to conventional independent offloading across users.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   cloud networking  

摘要： Major interest is currently given to the integration of clusters of virtualization servers, also referred to as 'cloudlets' or 'edge clouds', into the access network to allow higher performance and reliability in the access to mobile edge computing services. We tackle the edge cloud network design problem for mobile access networks. The model is such that the virtual machines (VMs) are associated with mobile users and are allocated to cloudlets. Designing an edge cloud network implies first determining where to install cloudlet facilities among the available sites, then assigning sets of access points, such as base stations to cloudlets, while supporting VM orchestration and considering partial user mobility information, as well as the satisfaction of service-level agreements. We present linkpath formulations supported by heuristics to compute solutions in reasonable time. We qualify the advantage in considering mobility for both users and VMs as up to 20% less users not satisfied in their SLA with a little increase of opened facilities. We compare two VM mobility modes, bulk and live migration, as a function of mobile cloud service requirements, determining that a high preference should be given to live migration, while bulk migrations seem to be a feasible alternative on delay-stringent tiny-disk services, such as augmented reality support, and only with further relaxation on network constraints.

关键词： edge caching   energy-efficient   mobile edge computing   5G cellular networks  

摘要： Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which is considered a promising and emerging paradigm to provide caching capabilities in proximity to mobile devices in 5G networks, enables fast, popular content delivery of delay-sensitive applications at the backhaul capacity of limited mobile networks. Most existing studies focus on cache allocation, mechanism design and coding design for caching. However, grid power supply with fixed power uninterruptedly in support of a MEC server (MECS) is costly and even infeasible, especially when the load changes dynamically over time. In this paper, we investigate the energy consumption of the MECS problem in cellular networks. Given the average download latency constraints, we take the MECS's energy consumption, backhaul capacities and content popularity distributions into account and formulate a joint optimization framework to minimize the energy consumption of the system. As a complicated joint optimization problem, we apply a genetic algorithm to solve it. Simulation results show that the proposed solution can effectively determine the near-optimal caching placement to obtain better performance in terms of energy efficiency gains compared with conventional caching placement strategies. In particular, it is shown that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the joint cost when backhaul capacity is low.

关键词： Mobile Edge Computing   Edge computing   Fog computing   Cloudlets  

摘要： The emergence of several new computing applications, such as virtual reality and smart environments, has become possible due to availability of large pool of cloud resources and services. However, the delay sensitive applications pose strict delay requirements that transforms euphoria into a problem. The cloud computing paradigm is unable to meet the requirements of low latency, location awareness, and mobility support. In this context, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) was introduced to bring the cloud services and resources closer to the user proximity by leveraging the available resources in the edge networks. In this paper, we present the definitions of the MEC given by researchers. Further, motivation of the MEC is highlighted by discussing various applications. We also discuss the opportunities brought by the MEC and some of the important research challenges are highlighted in MEC environment. A brief overview of accepted papers in our Special Issue on MEC is presented. Finally we conclude this paper by highlighting the key points and summarizing the paper. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.

关键词： Cloud computing   Cloud storage security   Mobile Edge Computing   Multimedia data  

摘要： This paper presents a movie recommendation system according to scores that the users provide. In view of the movie evaluation system, the impacts of access control and multimedia security are analyzed, and a secure hybrid cloud storage architecture is presented. Mobile-Edge Computing (MEC) technology is used in the public cloud which guarantees the high efficiency requirements of the transmission of the multimedia content. The processes of the system including registration, user login, role assignment, data encryption and data decryption are also described. At last, the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed which further shows that the various possible attacks can be mitigated via the proposed system. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

关键词： mobile edge computing   5G   low latency   network architecture   processor sharing   and performance evaluation  

摘要： Attaining extremely low latency service in 5G cellular networks is an important challenge in the communication research field. A higher QoS in the next-generation network could enable several unprecedented services, such as Tactile Internet, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. However, these services will all need support from powerful computational resources provided through cloud computing. Unfortunately, the geolocation of cloud data centers could be insufficient to satisfy the latency aimed for in 5G networks. The physical distance between servers and users will sometimes be too great to enable quick reaction within the service time boundary. The problem of long latency resulting from long communication distances can be solved by Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), though, which places many servers along the edges of networks. MEC can provide shorter communication latency, but total latency consists of both the transmission and the processing times. Always selecting the closest edge server will lead to a longer computing latency in many cases, especially when there is a mass of users around particular edge servers. Therefore, the research studies the effects of both latencies. The communication latency is represented by hop count, and the computation latency is modeled by processor sharing (PS). An optimization model and selection policies are also proposed. Quantitative evaluations using simulations show that selecting a server according to the lowest total latency leads to the best performance, and permitting an over-latency barrier would further improve results.

关键词： IoT   Mobile Cloud Federation   Mobile Edge Computing   Fog Computing   Coalition formation   Game theory  

摘要： In the Internet of Things (IoT) arena, a constant evolution is observed towards the deployment of integrated environments, wherein heterogeneous devices pool their capacities to match wide-ranging user requirements. Solutions for efficient and synergistic cooperation among objects are, therefore, required. This paper suggests a novel paradigm to support dynamic cooperation among private/public local clouds of IoT devices. Differently from device-oriented approaches typical of Mobile Cloud Computing, the proposed paradigm envisages an IoT Cloud Provider (ICP)-oriented cooperation, which allows all devices belonging to the same private/public owner to participate in the federation process. Expected result from dynamic federations among ICPs is a remarkable increase in the amount of service requests being satisfied. Different from the Fog Computing vision, the network edge provides only management support and supervision to the proposed Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service (MIFaaS), thus reducing the deployment cost of peripheral micro data centers. The paper proposes a coalition formation game to account for the interest of rational cooperative ICPs in their own payoff. A proof-of-concept performance evaluation confirms that obtained coalition structures not only guarantee the satisfaction of the players' requirements according to their utility function, but also these introduce significant benefits for the cooperating ICPs in terms of number of tasks being successfully assigned. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) (a.k.a. fog computing) has recently emerged to enable low-latency and location-aware data processing at the edge of mobile networks. Since providing grid power supply in support of MEC can be costly and even infeasible in some scenarios, on-site renewable energy is mandated as a major or even sole power supply. Nonetheless, the high intermittency and unpredictability of energy harvesting creates many new challenges of performing effective MEC. In this paper, we develop an algorithm called GLOBE that performs joint geographical load balancing (GLB) and admission control for optimizing the system performance of a network of MEC-enabled and energy harvesting-powered base stations. By leveraging and extending the Lyapunov optimization with perturbation technique, GLOBE operates online without requiring future system information and addresses significant challenges caused by battery state dynamics and energy causality constraints. Moreover, GLOBE works in a distributed manner, which makes our algorithm scalable to large networks. We prove that GLOBE achieves a close-to-optimal system performance compared to the offline algorithm that knows full future information, and present a critical tradeoff between battery capacity and system performance. Simulation results validate our analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of GLOBE compared to benchmark algorithms. Copyright © 2017, The Authors. All rights reserved.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： As the explosive growth of smart devices and the advent of many new applications, traffic volume has been growing exponentially. The traditional centralized network architecture cannot accommodate such user demands due to heavy burden on the backhaul links and long latency. Therefore, new architectures which bring network functions and contents to the network edge are proposed, i.e., mobile edge computing and caching. Mobile edge networks provide cloud computing and caching capabilities at the edge of cellular networks. In this survey, we make an exhaustive review on the state-of-the-art research efforts on mobile edge networks. We first give an overview of mobile edge networks including definition, architecture and advantages. Next, a comprehensive survey of issues on computing, caching and communication techniques at the network edge is presented respectively. The applications and use cases of mobile edge networks are discussed. Subsequently, the key enablers of mobile edge networks such as cloud technology, SDN/NFV and smart devices are discussed. Finally, open research challenges and future directions are presented as well. Copyright © 2017, The Authors. All rights reserved.